<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas <<a href="mailto:mpt@canonical.com">mpt@canonical.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> It is true that some menu items in Ubuntu have context menus (another example is Firefox's Bookmarks menu), but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Most menu items do the same thing when you right-click on them as when you right-click on them. There's no visible distinction between menu items that have a context menu and menu items that don't.</blockquote></div> It's an implicit logical distinction. When you click a menu like the file menu, you only have one task in mind: selecting an item from that menu to perform its action. No context menus make sense because there is only one context. Firefox is a great example actually. When you open up the bookmarks menu, the context you start in is the same as the File menu: you want to open a menu item... But all too often, you can quickly find yourself diverted by cruft that needs removing. If I had to load up the bookmark manager each time I wanted to remove a bookmark, I just wouldn't bother bookmarking at all because I'd just junk it up too often. Letting users perform maintenance operations within another context helps cut the size of these tasks down. It's a massive usability boon. It allows them to use their system more and clean up after it less. You could argue that it's these sorts of implicit intricacies that make computing hard for beginners... But when the right click gesture means "show alternative tasks for this item" in almost every other facet of the modern desktop OS, not including it is more confusing.